It was a dream. It was a gamble. But it was a plan that the splendidly alliterative Lashbrooks, Lynn and Liz, felt would become a business success story. The prominence of Sports Management Worldwide (SMWW) in the online sports education world is the result.

The year was 1998, and the Lashbrooks were newlyweds. Lynn Lashbrook, a Kansas City, Mo., native, was working as an agent for NFL players after a long career in higher education. Liz Lashbrook, a Crescent Valley High grad who majored in marketing at Pacific Lutheran, was employed in membership sales at Cascade Athletic Club in Gresham.

The Lashbrooks brainstormed. Liz offered a suggestion to her hubby.

“Lynn is a garrulous fellow,” Liz says. “He would take anyone to coffee and tell them how to be an agent. He’d come home from recruiting a top (athlete) and he was more excited about the guy on the airline who wanted to be an agent. I said, ‘You should make a living out of teaching people how to be an agent.’ ”

Online education was in its infancy, and Lynn was intrigued. So many more people could be involved, at a lesser cost, if the teaching were done via computer. Students, in fact, could come from anywhere in the world. So he laid the groundwork for what would become the first global online sports management school.

No similar online sports management program exists in the U.S. today.

“Lynn created it because he saw people wanted to be a sports agent,” Liz says. “It’s not rocket science. If you could teach them and mentor them on how to do it, they’d be much ahead of some guy who doesn’t know the business.”

In 2003, the business began to be called “Sports Management Worldwide.”  At first, the only class offering was called “Athlete Management — eight weeks to become a sports agent.” Lynn taught the course himself. Then it was time to expand.

Says Liz: “Lynn’s accountant said, ‘One course is great, but you need a whole lot more.’ ”

The Lashbrooks added a second course, this one taught by Tom Leip and Scott Lesser. Leip worked in administration for more than 30 years in the minor leagues of baseball, hockey and soccer. Lesser is a former student of Lynn’s at Oregon State who has worked for the Jacksonville Jaguars. The class was designed to train students to become account executives for athletic programs and organizations.

The third course was called “Baseball GM and Scouting,” taught by noted baseball writer/author and former ESPN columnist Rob Neyer. “Still a huge seller for us,” Liz says. More students get jobs after taking this course than any other course. It is now taught by former LA Dodgers general manager Dan Evans and Hank Jones, a 40-year veteran MLB scout.

The Lashbrooks quickly added the GM and scouting courses in the Big Four sports (football, basketball, baseball and hockey) along with soccer. They first conducted the classes on their own, then used “Blackboard,” the online learning platform used by major universities, beginning in 2006. Lynn felt Blackboard was too complex and had a web designer build a virtual classroom called “E-arena.”

Today, 25 years after its inception, SMWW offers more than 40 eight-week online courses taught by industry experts for college credit. It offers five graduate degrees for sports leadership and sports management and boasts more than 50 adjunct faculty members from around the globe teaching certificate courses.

The school now has more than 30,000 alumni from 163 countries.

“Our students now are so successful, they come back and hire our graduates,” Liz says. “People keep coming back for more courses to continue advancing in their careers. They keep begging for more. We’ve gotten 95 percent approval rating in our surveys.”

Some of the students, you may have heard of.

Shortly after he was fired as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2018, Mike Matheny took SMWW’s baseball analytics course. In October 2019, he was hired as manager of the Kansas City Royals, a position he held until his firing on Oct. 5.

Lynn says Matheny’s agent called him and hooked the two up on the phone.

“I didn’t have the skill set to get hired again,” Matheny says. “I realized I needed to retrain myself. With SMWW, I got analytics and media training and started my Masters degree. Then I got hired by the Royals.”

The Toronto Raptors claimed the NBA championship in 2019. Beginning with his time as an assistant coach and concluding during his run as head coach of the Raptors, Nick Nurse took Concordia University-Chicago’s doctorate program, with which SMWW is partnered. He is now not just the Raptors’ head coach; he is also Dr. Nick Nurse, having completed requirements for a Ph.D in sports leadership.

In the early days of SMWW, Mike Johnston — vice president, GM and head coach of the WHL Portland Winter Hawks — grew frustrated while trying to hire an administrative assistant. Mike called Lynn for assistance. Lynn introduced Mike to one of SMWW’s students at its NHL Draft Career Conference. Lisa Hollenback has now worked for the Winterhawks for 11 years and is now VP of operations.

SMWW’s curriculum has expanded to all-encompassing for the would-be sports executive, employee or agent.

“We teach these people how to work on the business side of sports,” says Ike Worth, business operations manager/sports agent with SMWW. “To work in any sport across the world, if you want to work in a specific area, we have a class to teach you how to do that. You learn it from people who have done the jobs you want to do. They’re going to teach you what it takes to get the job you’re looking for.”

Hundreds of SMWW graduates now working in college and pro sports positions are proof.

“I’m most proud of the number of alumni we have, and we’re just beginning,” Lynn says. “Online (education) is scalable, so we know we can grow.”

We welcome Sports Management Worldwide — our newest addition as a supporting sponsor of kerryeggers.com. Thank you Lynn and Liz! (For information go to smww.com)

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Many Portlanders remember Lynn as one of the early driving forces behind the movement to bring major league baseball to the city. That remains a passion for the president/founder of SMWW. But there is much more to his resume. Lynn has more than 40 years combined experience as an NCAA athletic director, educator, coach, scout and registered NFL agent.

The Kansas City native and ardent fan of the Chiefs and Royals played defensive back at Division II Fort Hays State in Hays, Kansas, from 1966-69.

“Walked on and got a scholarship after my first game,” says Lynn, who was a four-year starter for the Tigers.

Lashbrook got his Masters degree in physical education at Springfield (Mass.) College, then enrolled at Northern Colorado as a doctorate student and head freshman football coach. Lynn earned his doctorate at age 23. He has taught at 16 universities in the U.S. and abroad. Lynn has been in the classroom for more than 50 years.

In 1973, Lynn returned to Fort Hays State to teach and serve as assistant football and track and field coach. Seven years later, he was hired at Missouri as an assistant athletic director in charge of academics and compliance.

“That’s where I met Jim Steiner,” says Lynn, the reference to the agent who handled affairs for the likes of Jerry Rice, Roger Craig, Randall Cunningham and William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

Lashbrook then became an athletic director, first for three years at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, then at Alaska-Fairbanks for five years. He says he turned down the AD job at Western Michigan, instead moving to St. Louis to join Steiner’s agency. Lashbrook became an NFL-certified agent in 1993.

“My first year, I got four players who all made the NFL,” Lynn says.

Lynn is still certified and is one of the longest-tenured agents in the business. He says he has represented about 200 NFL players — credit given for those who make a team’s 90-man roster. Lynn has represented first-round draft picks to free agents. Those include Brian Dawkins, inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2018, Mark Fields and Alex Van Dyke.

Lynn eventually became disenchanted with working with an agency.

“After recruiting Ryan Leaf for two years, only to lose him to Leigh Steinberg, I decided there has to be a better way,” he says. “I realized that a corporate agency can’t meet the needs of the individual.”

Lashbrook was intrigued with the possibility of working on his own as an agent, incorporating the role as trusted family advisor into his services. And Lynn had begun to view Portland as a logical site for a major league franchise. He wanted to help lead the charge.

“Lynn moved to Portland because he saw an opportunity to bring MLB to Portland, and he was recruiting heavily (as an agent) out of Washington, Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State.” Liz says.

The move, in 1996, meant the conjoining of two worlds. Lynn and Liz had met earlier that year at a trade show in Boston. Soon they were married. But Lynn had another affair of the heart.

“I fell in love with the Internet,” he says. “I’m an educator at heart. I could see its cost-effective reach in the world, and sports is a universal language. And that’s what my dream was. It’s corny. But I needed to make a business out of it, and that’s where Liz comes in.”

Liz didn’t come in full-time with the business until 2004, when she assumed the executive director role.

“My Cascade job was very similar to what I do now,” she says. “Everything I’d done to that point fed into this. I developed a business model for us. I became the partner on the business side. Lynn is the visionary; I’m the operations.”

In the early 2000s, Lynn was spending much of his time pushing MLB to PDX (visit mustlovebaseball.com) while working as an adjunct professor at several state schools, including Oregon State.

“In my first class — sports management — two of my students were Jonathan Smith and Mitch Canham,” Lynn says.

Lynn remains involved in trying to help put Portland in position for an MLB franchise. He still believes it’s going to happen.

“Never got paid a dollar,” he says. “Baseball is a hobby, not a job.”

Through the years, SMWW has added courses involving nearly every sport, using Lynn’s connections to attract well-regarded teachers and lecturers.

There is a baseball agent course taught by MLB agent John Boggs of San Diego; an NBA agent course taught by NBA agent Bret Kanis; an NFL agent course taught be Joel Corry, former NBA and NFL agent; a soccer agent class taught by Sky Andrew, British Olympian and FIFA agent. There is a salary cap analysis course taught by Nick Polk, former Atlanta Falcons director of football operations.

Cricket. Rugby. Motor sports, E-sports. Sports betting. Broadcasting, media, coaching. You name it, SMWW has a class covering it.

The SMWW Scouting Service trains prospective scouts and gives student the chance to scout an area and create relationships with many teams.

The SMWW Sports Agency offers alumni the opportunity to work as sports agent advisors and to co-represent athletes who want/need a more personalized sports agent. Through this program they have represented and given hundreds of clients this opportunity. Earliest examples were NFL quarterback Matt Moore, NBA guard Rodney Stuckey, and most recently, Dallas Cowboys return specialist KaVontae Turpin, the USFL’s Most Valuable Player this past season.

“KaVontae is probably the poster child of what the future is for us,” says Lynn, who co-represents Turpin with SMWW alumni now agent advisors Brian Lowe and Perry Boler. “I mentor them. The Cowboys took a chance on KaVontae, and it wouldn’t have happened without their hard work.”

SMWW students attend live-and-in-person conferences — “we do 5 to 10 a year,” Liz says — that put them in the heart of the action to learn how sports businesses work and to network with those in the field. Students in the past have attended the NFL combine, the NHL draft, the MLB winter meetings, the NBA summer league, the MLS draft and international games that have a U.S. influence, such as NFL London.

“We started in 1998 at the NFL combine,” Liz says. “We host conferences where the executives go. Lynn hosts an all-day conference with speakers and is the moderator. (During the conferences) he has interviewed GMs, scouts, head coaches and top agents in the respective sports.

“The leagues love us,” Liz says. “The NHL saves us 200 seats in the lower bowl during the draft. They want our students to be there; they are the future leaders of hockey. Through all this, Lynn is mentoring and guiding students on how to get jobs in sports. A favorite Lynnism: “Follow your passion.”

Beginning with a conference in Toronto from Nov. 10-12, SMWW will be represented at events in San Diego, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Nashville. London, Raleigh, N.C., and Las Vegas through next summer. Lynn’s frequent flier miles will be going through the roof.

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Interest in SMWW spiked when it aired Mel Kiper Jr. endorsement radio ads — “You can be a sports agent in as little as eight weeks” — in 2003 and ’04.

“Our phone rang off the hook,” Liz says. “People were so excited. We’d get 25 calls a day that said, ‘We want this right now.’ And one or two that said, ‘You’re the devil. You can’t do this on the Internet.’  Another was from an agent, who said, ‘I’m going to sue you; you can’t be a sports agent without being an attorney.’ I said, ‘Yes you can. My husband is one, and he’s not an attorney.’ ”

Liz says students contact SMWW offices from throughout the world wanting sports career advice. The SMWW Career Advisors can be reached at SMWW.com or 503 445-7105, offering free advice.

“Keep your day job, take a course and SMWW will give you the ‘What you know’ and ‘Who You know,’ ” Liz says.

Everyone eventually wants to be a college athletic director or professional general manager. Or maybe they want to become a certified player agent. None of that happens overnight.

Says Liz: “Teams came to us and said, ‘Don’t teach them to be just an agent. Can you also teach them to do ticket sales?’ These are professional account executive jobs where they are running game and season ticket sales. We’ve had people get a ticket job within four weeks. (SMWW grads) work all over the world, in all professional leagues, colleges, community colleges.”

Paul Epstein was one of the first students to go through the tickets sales class. He started with an entry-level position with the L.A. Clippers, working his way up to being the team’s sales manager. After filling a similar position with the New Orleans Pelicans, Epstein was hired by the San Francisco 49ers and wound up leading a national sales campaign for Super Bowl 2014. He oversaw a $1 billion campaign for the 49ers while opening Levi’s Stadium. Epstein is now a motivational speaker.

Gresham native Carl Moesche was a scout for the Boston Red Sox when he took SMWW’s baseball analytics course in 2017.

“It provided an excellent foundation for exploration of both sides of player evaluations for me,” says Moesche, now a scouting supervisor with the Red Sox. “The knowledge I gained in this course played an invaluable role in my acceptance of my latest baseball appointment.”

Not all SMWW graduates get jobs.

“We don’t guarantee job placement,” Liz says. “We guarantee job placement assistance. We are excellent with it. Lots of (graduates) get jobs in sports, and them move on to other jobs. Every single MLB team at one time has hired a graduate.

“When you take a class from us, your mentors are going to figure out where you best fit in. Are they going to go to a buddy in the industry with a recommendation if you’re doing a great job and look like a good candidate? Absolutely. Are they going to forward your resume? Maybe. They’re not going to risk their reputation unless you earned it, and they won’t recommend you except at the right level.”

SMWW has a reputation now in the sporting world. Teams often contact the office, Liz says, when they have openings.

Says Liz: “We’ll get an email from (an executive with) an NFL team that says, ‘This is what we’re looking for. Can you put the word out? Can you cherry-pick out of the class for me?’ ”

Mike Oke, SMWW’s hockey scouting and analytics mentor and a general manager in the Ontario Hockey Major Junior League, has assisted hundreds of the school’s students with jobs in the industry — working for teams in minor and major league hockey.

“There are lots of opportunities in every sport,” Liz says. “There are lots of places of entry, whether it be college, minor leagues, major leagues or globally.

“Our students have been taught how to write scouting reports. They’ve done informational interviews. All of our people have realistic expectations about how much they’re going to make, how to get a job and how long it takes to move up the ladder.”

The Lashbrooks lean on Jeff Brodie, the company’s vice president, for a plethora of duties.

“Jeff has been with us through thick and thin for 14 years,” Lynn says of the Oregon State grad and Lake Oswego resident. “He is our anchor, our glue.”

The Lashbrooks are optimistic about the work of Lynn and SMWW’s agent advisors in all sports.

“We’ve given so many diamonds in the rough an opportunity to play in professional sports, which they never would have had,” Liz says. Players who aren’t high draft picks “get a young agent who works their tail off to help a player make a team. As long as they have Lynn for the credibility and the mentoring and the certification, it’s been magical. If you look back at all the people we got an opportunity to play — even if they got cut from a team’s 53-man roster — it’s a lot.”

SMWW remains one of a kind.

“I’m most proud of 25 years with a great reputation and credibility in the industry like no other,” Lynn says. “We’ve been around so long, now GMs of teams send people to us even after they get hired. We will train them faster than they can on their own staff.”

Then there’s the personal satisfaction element.

“So many people get to live their dream,” Liz says. “We have helped people who don’t think it’s possible. To me, that’s so fulfilling.”

The dream, it would seem, has been realized. The gamble was worth it.

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